Adair Turner, a former chairman of the United Kingdom's Financial Services Authority and former member of the UK's Financial Policy Committee, is Chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. His latest book is Between Debt and the Devil.

Comments

Even with electrification of road transport, one would still need to generate electricity. It might work for the West, but in the developing world with rolling blackouts, power generation capacity already lags to meet the existing commercial and household demand. Putting cars on electricity is a stretch for developing countries. In Pakistan, where the government encouraged the road transport vehicles to switch to LNG, reverted its decision after a shortage of natural gas that was partially addressed with LNG. Read more

Paris was like two young parents agreeing that they should all agree to try 'their level best' to get two out of their three children to survive until adulthood, and then patting themselves on the back they what they achieved was 'better than nothing'. Read more

Why do you not focus on the proposed raising of the worlds population from 7 billion to 10 billion. Thats 3 billion up. Last time I looked 3 billion people, impoverished or not can consume quite a bit of energy

Lets say the West comprise 1billion people and is largely static in population terms. That means the rest of the world is due to double. If the 'average African', whatever that is, is consuming 10% of the typical Westerner then the rest of the World is due to double its consumption. As the rest of the world needs more energy if it is to progress industrally which is touted as the answer to poverty then there is a fair bet the rest of the World will be consuming 4x the current level possibly very significantly more. For the Wests consumption to contract to balance that out that is possible but highly unlikely so there is no question of standing still

The crux of the problem is as well as energy consumption being constrained population growth also has to be constrained because population growth inevitably is tied in with industrialisation and industrialisation demands more energy

You are not addressing the main area that needs attention in parrallel which is population growth Read more

"Before this century is over, we should seek to enable all the world’s people – probably more than ten billion by then – to achieve the standards of living currently enjoyed only by the wealthiest 10%. "Seriously, dudes, we should first do a reality check to discover if this is even achievable, let alone sustainable.Spoiler: It's not. Read more

To publish any article on long term climate that does not mention carbon pricing is irresponsible. The idea that we can achieve the speed of transition we need based just on subsidies, R&D and voluntary government programs reveals a staggering denial of what current trends tells us.

COP21 was a huge achievement, and it has allowed the debate to start, but no-one should think things are now getting better. We are continuing to add to CO2, pushing climate change further than ever before.

If we seriously want to stay below the 2'C limit, let alone the more ambitions 1.5'C target, we must now accept two more inconvenient truths :

2) To be viable this tax has to be agreed at a "Global" level to create a level playing field involving as a minimum all G20 nations.

Some will immediately rule these conclusions out as impractical, but they then reflect the same attitude as the climate change deniers - people who refuse to accept reality, because they don't want to deal with the conclusions it leads to.

PS On Air: The Super Germ Threat

NOV 2, 2016

In the latest edition of PS On
Air
, Jim O’Neill discusses how to beat antimicrobial resistance, which
threatens millions of lives, with Gavekal Dragonomics’ Anatole Kaletsky
and Leonardo Maisano of
Il Sole 24 Ore.

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